


How Much Louder

by Katherine



Category: I Could Series - Francesco Marciuliano (Poetry)
Genre: Cats, Gen, Lizards
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-15
Updated: 2015-10-15
Packaged: 2018-04-26 11:24:01
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,038
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5002912
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Katherine/pseuds/Katherine
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>My chance to speak with this poet of no small renown...</p>
            </blockquote>





	How Much Louder

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Rosencrantz](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rosencrantz/gifts).



> Based on "Ode to a Lizard I Didn't Know Is Also a Pet in This House" from _I Knead My Mommy and other poems by kittens_ by Francesco Marciuliano. Influenced also by a video Kitten vs. Lizard https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h14wr4pXZFk

_My chance to speak with this poet of no small renown came about after some planning. Her house is inconveniently not one of those fitted with that personal door known as a cat flap. However, we persevered and successfully met inside. My interview was more akin to noting a short, focused memoir, for she required little prompting._

* * *

Every poetry reading I do at least one cat in the audience yells for the lizard poem. If I had been a little more seasoned when I wrote that one, I might have picked a different first line. It's hard to yell "auuughhhh" convincingly when your throat's dry and you haven't got near enough to the table of canapes to have one toothpick's worth of mouse yet.

One of the first reviews I received included the suggestion that more unusual housemates afford additional scope for poem topics. I don't think much at all of that reduction. I would, I am certain, have been as strong a poet with a different influence.

I started my life in a different house than the one I came to grow up in, as is usual. I was seen then as a sweet little thing. I know this from hearing it when I was still a baby near my mother's side. My eyes were newly open then, the world an exciting but very difficult to distinguish blurred patchwork. So I did not know, at that time, the shine of my silky fur, or the lovely patterning of it, except from listening to a person's rapt description of me.

Of course I could see quite well by the month when I was taken to a home of my own and reduced from having a family about me to only one person (although he was always on call) to admire me. He must have kept the lizard enclosure shut up somewhere, or up so high that even an enthusiastic, exploring kitten's craning of the neck did not stretch so far as to bring the thing into view.

He kept two lizards. (That is a compliment to all our feline selves, that a person needed two of those bumpy-skinned animals to entertain himself only to nonetheless have to add a kitten to his household for a truly successful pet experience.) Yes, my poem only describes one, but that is the artistic license necessary to a successful poet.

Besides which, I was startled by only one of the lizards, that first, memorable time on the living room floor. My carefully crafted line "I just had no idea you live here too!" would only have been unbalanced by a section in which I told my audience there was a second lizard: one who did not follow that narrative action, as it were. Therefore I excised one of the lizards from my telling in order to keep the focus I wanted.

Something I did not exaggerate, on the other paw, is the pact I and the lizard made to test our household person's screaming. Indeed, once we got the second lizard to join in the fun, we invented a number of quite complex variations. The first of these was kitten on head accompanied by one lizard on each leg. Over time we came up with an ever enjoyable activity to which we gave the admittedly unpoetic title Everyone Pile On To His Chest And Bounce.

We became fast friends, those lizards and I. There were additional games once the household person moved the lizards' tank into a room I could easily enter. It was with that access that I cleverly worked out that I could shift the screen lid from atop. Thus I would let my friends out for more adventures together. There was a glorious day when one of the lizards' dinner crickets escaped and all three of us chased it around the whole of the ground floor, all the way up the stairs.

Sometimes we switched places. On such afternoons, they two would zoom around the house. (If they had fur it would, I am certain, have been fluffed with excitement, the way we cats' fur does in the evening's best zooming time.) Meanwhile, I settled myself comfortably on their rock, enjoying the warmth of the lightbulb set above. Cats can bask as well as lizards. In point of fact, I have recently been working on a quiet poem about basking.

My next anthology might pair that one with my Ode. They would contrast well together: a relaxed moment in adulthood set against the frequently startled, ever-changing days of being a small kitten.

* * *

_On that tantalizing hint of works to come we concluded, before I quietly took myself to a different part of the house. There I obtained what I might modestly call an unprecedented interview. The main points are reproduced below. They come primarily from just one of the lizards. The other indicated its disinterest in the free press by staying behind a large rock, only the end of a grey-green tail visible to me._

* * *

My sibling and I don't long for the great outdoors. The great desert maybe, sometimes, but that's nothing that is within reach. So this house suits us reasonably well. We have been provided with a good place to bask, which is very important indeed. Also, when we feel like moving, there is enough elsewhere in the house to entertain us.

That kitten, as she was then, was a rather good addition. Worth getting off the basking rock for the company of, actually. All the more so when she got bigger and more useful with the paws. Not that we didn't get ourselves out of here before, but that was more a matter of coordinating with the screen being left that handy bit askew. Much more convenient to have someone in the house who will get a paw in there and put the screen right out of the way. So the run of the house...

No, neither of us have been to one of her poetry readings. Too much sitting still at those things, from what we've heard, and not nearly enough warm light to sit under.

Well, and I might go so far as to quietly admit: she did not in fact invite us.


End file.
